By Tobias Schlosser
On his seventh album, dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah shows that he still has a great deal of
energy and anger, but also heaps of empathy and love.
The title of
his complex and well-thought-out record Revolutionary
Minds (Fane Phonics label) immediately makes clear that his main agenda is changing the world.
He wants to see people liberating themselves from oppressing forces.
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| The cover of Revolutionary Minds. |
As with his former records, Zephaniah does not
focus on one specific issue of marginalisation and exclusion, but on a range of
issues that include unequal educational opportunities, animal rights, women’s
rights, indigenous rights, religious freedom, sexual abuse of children by
religious authorities, political and artistic corruption, police
arbitrariness, the state of whistle-blowers, past and possible future
environmental catastrophes and so on (the list doesn’t end here).
Some might
associate revolution with chaos, violence and inherently dangerous movements
that could lead to totalitarian regimes. But this is not the revolution
Zephaniah has in mind. The artist is turning the tables and making it perfectly
clear that the most dangerous thing is not being a revolutionary. He
demonstrates the danger of passivity in the song “In this World”:
We live in a world where
they say we communicate more, but the world stayed silent when the slave trade
was making money, the world stayed silent when the Nazis started to kill trade
unionists, people with disabilities, homosexuals, left-handed people and Jews,
and now in the age of the global village and mass communications, the world is
staying silent as the Palestinians are annihilated.
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| Benjamin Zephaniah and band (photo R. Ecclestone). |
The heart of Revolutionary Minds consists of the
longest, electronic, dub-wise track “In this World”. The poem is a mere
enumeration of injustices in the world we inhabit:
We live in a world where
one in four people live in a state of absolute poverty, 35,000 children die
each day because they are born to poor parents, each year 24,000 people are
killed and maimed by landmines, and when you hear the information rich telling
you that the world is ‘wired’ and getting smaller, remember many people in the
world have never made a phone call.
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| A serious Zephaniah (R. Ecclestone). |
Fans may
sometimes get the impression that they’re at a philosophy lecture, hearing a
smart person creatively explain Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil,
and learning that evil powers can emerge when everybody just plays by the rules
of the current regime, focusing on what is right or wrong in the eyes of the
leaders. Here, moral obligations – which might result in disagreement and
resistance – are rejected by the individual. Are most people just too lazy or
afraid to make an effort to achieve change?
This
passivity might also be the reason that a certain president is currently in
power; he is the subject of the poem “President”. Without revealing the name of
the person, it is still clear whom Zephaniah has in mind when he vents his
fury: “Dear Mister President [...] you suck presidentially. Just run, run as
slowly as you can, and take your arms trade with you”.
Zephaniah’s
anger seems equally a sign of deep sadness. In the poem “What Stephen Lawrence Has
Taught Us”, the artist reminds his listeners of the death of the young British
man who was murdered in 1993. The case unveiled institutionalised racism in
Britain and questioned the juridical practice of double jeopardy with regard to
murder cases. With the current incidents of police violence in the United States,
bringing up the case of Stephen Lawrence is like witnessing a never-ending
tragic cycle. Almost 25 years later, his murder reminds us that we live in a world
where freedom and justice are not rights that can be taken for granted.
With respect
to musical influences, Revolutionary
Minds is quite diverse, very electronic, very roots and very reggae-based.
It is not easy to put Zephaniah’s artistic styles into one genre. However, it
is not necessary to do so. The artist has other motivations, as he has already
stated on his last record Naked: “Is
it hip hop or is it reggae, who really care? As long as it’s loud, as long as
it’s clear”. And it is clear.
Tobias Schlosser is a writer, researcher and expert drink-maker, based in Germany.
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Twitter: @mckenzie_ale
